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iWemorial ^btrresfs; belifaereb bp Mr. Wiili 
H^. (Kfjompsion before a Sfoint B>ti9iion of 
ti)e Senate anb l^ousfe of i^epregentatibesf 
of tfje tlCbirteentJ) ICegiglature of tfje ^tate 
of l^asibmgtoif, ijclb m tfje J^ouit Cfjamber 
at (0lpmpia, Mebnesbap. jfebruar? tfje 
tKtoelftf), jBimeteen Hunbreb anb Cfjirteen 

Published by Anthority of the Thirteenth Leiislatnre 



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.8 



FRANK M. LAMBORN, PUBLIC PRINTER 
OLYMPIA, WASH. 



itt Jfribap. Jfcfaruarp 7tf). 1913, 

in tf)e ^asfjinffton fetate g)tn- 

ate, g>enator (georse ?H. $iper, 

representing tfje 34tf) g>enatorial ©ia- 

trict, Hing Countp, offereb tfje foUotoing 

ai g>enate Concurrent "Resolution ^.10 



►enate Concurrent 3Regolution Mo. Wm 



Wheeeas Wednesday, February 12th, is the anni- 
versary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and 

Whereas it is a legal holiday in this state, there- 
fore be it 

Resolved by the Senate, the House concurring, that 
joint memorial exercises be held in the House cham- 
ber at two o'clock on Wednesday, February 12th, 
and that a committee of two from the Senate and 
three from the House be appointed to make suitable 
arrangements for such exercises, and be it further 

Resolved that the Honorable Will H. Thompson, 
of Seattle, be invited to make an address upon the 
occasion. 



The President of the Senate called for a rising 
vote on the resolution and it was adopted unani- 
mously. 

On motion of Senator Piper, the rules were sus- 
pended and Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 10 
was ordered immediately transmitted to the House 
by William T. Laube, Secretary of the Senate. 

On the same day, February 7, 1913, the resolution 
was taken up under suspension of the rules by the 
House of Representatives and unanimously adopted. 

The Speaker appointed Messrs. Zednick, Black 
and Truax as a committee on the part of the House of 
Representatives under Senate Concurrent Resolution 
No. 10. The resolution was returned to the Senate 
immediately by C. R. Maybury, Chief Clerk of the 
House. 

Lieutenant Governor Louis F. Hart, President of 
the Senate, appointed Senators Piper and McCoy as 
Senate members of the committee, on February 11th, 
1913. 

Enrolled Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 10 
was signed by the President of the Senate and the 
Speaker of the House February 11, 1913. 



House Chamber, Olympia, Washington 



Wednesday, February 12th, 1913. 

The joint Legislative Session was called to order 
by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, 
Howard D. Taylor, at 2 : 00 o'clock p. m. 

Governor Ernest Lister presided over the joint 
session and introduced Mr. Will H. Thompson, who 
addressed the assembly as follows : 

Governor Lister and members of the General As- 
sembly of Washmgton, ladies and gentlemen: 
"I should be justly chargeable with ingratitude 
did I fail to thank the members of the Senate and 
the House of Representatives of the State of Wash- 
ington for the concurrent resolution that called me 
here to speak of him who sleeps at Springfield. I 
have no such vanity, however, as for one moment to 
think that it was because of any supposed power 
upon my part to do justice to the subject that I am 
called upon to devote my time to that induced me 
to be called. But there were other, broader, better 
and higher considerations, no doubt. The colossal 
war, that seems to be inseparable from our thought 
of Abraham Lincoln, has long since passed away. 
It has thundered itself into silence; there is scarcely 
a reverberating echo of it now; the brutal cannon 
that boomed upon our hills until their iron lungs 
were hoarse are mute now, and the spider's web is 
woven across their rusted lips, and in all this great 
land, from the cold, white lakes of the north to the 
warm waves of the Mexican gulf, and from the At- 



lantic shores of oak to the Pacific shores of fir, we 
are one great, united, happy, prosperous land. There 
is no north and no south, no east and no west in our 
love for our country. There are no jarring voices 
now. One state is as loyal as any other state. It 
was considerations, no doubt, like these, rather than 
any supposed fitness upon my part which induced 
the Legislative Assembly to invite here to address you 
upon this occasion a war-scarred and time-battered 
veteran of the army of Robert E. Lee, to speak a 
word by way of memorial about him of whom no 
language is sufficient of expression ; and I am here 
today, because of your kindness and grace, to bear 
my little, unimportant part in these ceremonies. I 
thank you for it, indeed I do. 

"These memorial meetings are of vast advantage 
to America. 

"Daniel Webster, with stately rhetoric lauding the 
virtues of Jefferson and Adams, said: 'It is fit that 
by public assembly and solemn observance, by anthem 
and by eulogy we commemorate the services of na- 
tional benefactors.' 

"All people have so felt. The literature of the 
elder world would, if bereft of its splendid eulogies, 
be poor indeed. The tributes to great monarchs and 
heroes graven upon the pyramids and granite mono- 
liths of Egypt, and within the rock-hewn temples of 
Petra, are among the noblest productions of van- 
ished races. Homer's Iliad is largely a genius' co- 
lossal applause of the deeds of a demigod. Roman 
annals contain many noble orations in praise of great 



ones gone, but it was more than 1,600 years after 
the death of the greatest Cagsar before Shakespeare 
gave to Anthony's tribute its matchless grace. No 
great man's eulogy should be spoken until a century 
after his death. Not only because 'the grave buries 
every error, covers every defect and extinguishes 
every resentment,' but because distance is necessary 
for the true contemplation of all greatness. The 
lofty symmetrical mountain that stands out yonder, 
the grandest scenic figure in America, is, when viewed 
from its base, but a mass of shapeless cliffs gashed 
with caverns and heaped with the ruins of old ava- 
lanches. The flower of all knighthood, the one match- 
less among all of whom history, legend or tradition 
has had aught to say, had to wait his 2,000 years 
before Sir Thomas Mallory bent above his sleeping 
dust to say: 'Ah, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest. 
Thou wert never matched of earthly knight's hands ; 
and thou wert the courtliest knight that ever bare 
shield; and thou wert the truest friend to thy lover 
that ever bestrode horse; and thou wert the truest 
lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and 
thou wert the kindest man that ever stroke with 
sword; and thou wert the goodliest person that ever 
came among press of knights; and thou wert the 
meekest man and the gentlest that ever eat in hall 
among ladies ; and thou wert the sternest knight to 
thy mortal foe that ever put spear in rest.' The 
most tremendous plaudit ever yielded to human glory 
by mortal eloquence was Hugo's characterization of 
Napoleon : 

" 'He held within his brain the cube of human fac- 



ulties.. He was equal with the philosophers and sid- 
ereal with the astronomers. He made history and 
he wrote it. His bulletins were Iliads. He could 
laugh the laugh of a good man by the cradle of his 
child and then but wave his hand and armies set 
themselves in march. The flags of an empire rushed 
together; parks of artillery rolled along; bridges of 
boats stretched across the rivers ; clouds of cavalry 
galloped in the hurricane. There were cries and 
trumpets and the trembling of thrones everywhere. 
The frontiers of the kingdoms oscillated upon the 
map. Men saw him standing with a flame in his 
hands and a resplendence in his eyes, unfolding in 
his two wings the Grand Army and the Old Guard, 
and he was the archangel of war.' 

"By your grace and kindness I am called here to- 
day to stand with uncovered head and heart and give 
to you my brain's poor ofi'ering to the memory of 
one of the earth's greatest names. Many years ago 
at one of those brotherly meetings when first the 
heroes who wore the blue and those who wore the 
gray began to fraternize, I was called upon to re- 
spond to the sentiment, 'The Noblest Hero of the 
War.' The stage was hung with great pictures of 
Lincoln, Grant, Robert E. Lee, Sherman, Sheridan 
and Stonewall Jackson, and decorated with flags 
that had seen desperate battle. It was a soldiers' 
meeting and there was profound surprise when I said : 
'When a war assumes such magnitude that two mil- 
lions of armed men are marshalled upon one side and 
more than 700,000 upon the other, when heroism is 
the rule and cowardice the rare exception, it would 

10 



seem to be a colossal task to attempt to select the 
one hero matchless among them all. Yet among so 
many brave there must have been one bravest of the 
brave; among so many noble there must have been 
one noblest of them all. In our wild battle years 
deeds of valor were 'thicker than leaves in Vallam- 
brossa.' They were not confined to one side, for in 
that grand roll of honor where glory keeps the mem- 
ory of her brave there is no North and no South. 
But who is the one hero and where shall I go to find 
him.? If the most high God could send His angel 
upon such a quest he would call the lessening roll of 
all the living who wore the blue or who wore the gray, 
and the celestial messenger would kneel and softly 
knock at every tomb and monument and at every un- 
marked mossy mound or ditch where rests in dream- 
less sleep the ashes of the brave. He would know the 
qualities that go to make up the character of such a 
hero, and he would not pause in his quest until he 
found the one matchless among them all. He must 
be brave, for courage is the basis of all honor. He 
must be kind and tender as a woman, for fierceness 
and cruelty are nearly akin to moral cowardice. He 
must be patient, for the long war moaning through 
the land for weary years would break the courage of 
the volatile and restless. He must be the incarnation 
of hope, for the hopeless heart is always wedded to 
the nerveless hand. Above all he must be utterly un- 
selfish, ready to sacrifice himself for the good of all, 
giving Hfe and his own good fame, if need be, that 
dear freedom should not perish from the earth. Many 
an unmarked mound holds the decaying threads of 



11 



blue or gray that wrapped the mouldering bones of 
a hero, but he is not the one I seek. Brave and self- 
denying though he was, the private soldier did not 
carry through the gloomy battle years the burden 
of anxiety that weighed upon the soul of him who 
was compelled to order men to go down to death. 
But if we should ask the Genius of War to read to 
us the annals of the brave who were illustrious above 
their fellows how shall we yet find the one incompar- 
able hero.? If I should go among the gallant fellows 
who wore the blue and ask them, I might receive a 
variety of answers. One might well select the dash- 
ing Sheridan as his type, remembering the wild ride 
from Winchester and the passionate energy that 
turned rout into triumph. Another might choose 
Thomas as his ideal hero, recalling that awful 20th 
of September when for six dreadful hours the long 
gray waves, crested with steel and fringed with flame, 
beat in vain upon the Rock of Chickamauga. One 
would remember with tears the chivalric Reynolds 
lying dead upon the field of glory on Seminary 
Heights ; and one would see rising before him the dark 
battle-face of Logan with its stormy eyes. Every 
hero of the blue might turn inquiringly to the serene, 
resolute face of Grant, who said, 'I never count my 
dead,' and whose name has rung in the ears of men 
as far as the echoes of glory have yet rolled, and 
wherever the winds of fame have blown. 

"And on the other side, the soldier who wore the 
gray sees rising before him the pale, dead face of 
many a heroic comrade. What a wealth of heroes 
he has to choose from. Will he say, 'Give us Stone- 

12 



wall Jackson as our hero ; give us the silent and 
mysterious spirit that led us on so many victorious 
marches down the Shenandoah, with whom we never 
met defeat and who died in the front of his last grand 
victory'? Another would remember Gordon, the chev- 
alier of the Southern army ; or Cleboume, who in a 
moment of supreme peril never followed but always 
led, and whose form was the 'pillar of fire' that his 
men saw going before them into the gloom of battle. 
And every one who wore the gray, with bowed head 
and tear-filled eyes, might whisper the name of Lee. 
But I have not found my hero yet. Who is he.'' you 
ask. 

Noblest Hero of the War. 

"If I had some new and strange word with power 
to startle the human heart and rouse all the slumber- 
ing energies of the soul, I would say to you, 'Lift up 
your hearts, lift up your eyes to yon sad and patient 
face. There is the man, there is the noblest hero of 
the war ! There is the one matchless among the mil- 
lions ! When shall his glory fade .'* Time passes him 
with low-bowed head seeing 'eternal honor' graven 
beneath his name. One by one our precious names 
are dimmed and blurred by the despoiling years, but 
his fame grows and will not cease to grow. This 
nation has a heart, even as a man has. A mighty 
composite heart, fed and nourished by the warm, red 
streams that flow into it from heroic hearts from 
ocean to ocean and from lakes to gulf. In that 
mighty heart the blood of the North meets and 
mingles with the blood of the South, and in that vast 

13 



heart, deep-set and buttressed against the shocks of 
time, is reared the monument of Lincoln. Bearing 
the burdens of all upon his shoulders, weary unto 
death with his intolerable toil, sick at heart with pity 
for the dead and dying, he never faltered nor wavered 
in his duty. No disaster ever shook his courage, no 
loss ever darkened his immortal hope. Against the 
background of the darkest storm he saw the rosy 
arch of the bow of promise. His soul was too large 
for envy or jealousy or hate. And now, after long 
years, his fame is safe. It is the steepest path that 
leads to the highest land; it is the lightning-splin- 
tered and the storm-swept peaks that crush through 
the clouds and break into the still abode of stars. 

"It is 104 years ago today since the rough and 
narrow Kentucky cabin first sheltered the child who 
was born to be more than king or emperor. That 
cabin is a shrine now, but then none regarded it. 
No birth-star burned above it. No Magi journeyed 
from alien lands to find the child. In pinching pov- 
erty and in suffocating ignorance the child passed 
his young days until at 9 years of age, with labor- 
roughened hands, he helped to make the coffin to hide 
the face of her who gave him life. What brewing 
had this wine of which the world drank freedom? 
The genii are bom, not made. This boy's life re- 
volved only in the orbit of toil. The coarse-shod 
feet never knew the shades of academic groves. No 
flowers ever bloomed beside the rough life path up 
which, in poverty and toil, he crept toward the light. 
Through years of earnest effort and careful frugal- 
ity he had not, at the time he was chosen to fill the 

14 



highest office the world holds, amassed as much 
money as many of our attorneys have received as a 
single fee! 

"It has been nearly a half century since this man 
died, and yet to some of us it seems but yesterday. 
Born in the awful dawn of the nineteenth century, 
when the world was shaking to the tread of the 
marching armies of Napoleon, when the frontiers of 
mighty kingdoms 'oscillated upon the map,' he passed 
away in the last hours of the most terrible war that 
ever scarred the face of this planet. 

"What he did we know. It is not necessary to call 
the roll of his deeds. A land reunited and cemented 
with blood and flame; a flag once torn asunder, and 
now 'one and without a seam,' and upon which no 
star differs from another star in glory ; black swarms 
of traffic turned to men, the clang of whose falling 
chains yet reverberates through the world ; these are 
the monuments set to his memory. 

"To many the material achievements of a man are 
the matters of supreme interest when his memory is 
recalled. To me the first and the controlling thought 
is 'what was the secret of his greatness.?' What 
characteristic marked him for immortality.? What 
psychic attribute lifted him above his fellows and 
fixed his fadeless fame in bronze and marble.? In 
Napoleon it was ambition; in Washington it was 
majesty; in Shakespeare and Michael Angelo it was 
imagination; in Lincoln it was courage. Courage 
is the noblest attribute of the human soul. It is the 
one around which all the other qualities of head and 

15 



heart huddle in the hour of tumult. When it fails 
the man is lost. 

"Cowardice is the cause and basis of every crime 
that blackens the human soul. The Wizard of the 
Sierras was right when he said: 

^' 'I hold no sin or curse or vice 
So dark as that of cowardice.' 

"The thief steals because he has not the courage to 
fight the battle of life with the brave who toil; the 
assassin waits in the darkness for his enemy because 
he has not the courage to meet his adversary face to 
face on even terms ; the slanderer stabs character by 
inuendo or by anonymous writing because of the ter- 
ror of his contemptible soul. The editor who is a 
coward fills his columns with abuse of the citizen who 
crosses his wish, knowing that his victim has no equal 
means of retaliation. Men lie because they are afraid 
to face the righteous results of their acts. 

"Courage is the mightiest muniment of character. 
It is the rock upon which nobility is built. It is the 
sheet anchor that holds the steadfast soul in every 
storm that rolls. 

"The ancients and the barbaric peoples of the 
world have fixed the seat of courage in the heart 
rather than in the brain. Heroic captives have had 
their hearts torn out and crucified aloft before the 
eyes of exulting multitudes in order that all might 
see that the great hearts that had withstood their 
power so valorously were at last mangled and help- 
less. So wide-spread and universal has been this 
belief, even among modern peoples, that it has filled 

16 



all written languages with its tropes and metaphors. 
Tennyson makes Ulysses call upon his sailor com- 
rades for 'one equal purpose of heroic hearts.' Byron 
cried, upon leaving England forever, 'Here's a heart 
for any fate.' Shakespeare, in a hundred places, 
credits the heart for the courage that mocks at death. 
Ohver Wendell Holmes speaks of the dauntless and 
indomitable heart that 'breaks and leaves no sign,' 
and Jean Ingelow says: 'When the heart fails the 
hope of life is gone.' 

"For prodigies of valor, performed on a hundred 
fields in Europe and Asia, Richard of England has 
been known to history for 800 years as the Lion 
Heart. Aristotle and Plato ascribed to the heart 
this noblest of all virtues, and old Longinus of Pal- 
myra, when the legions of imperial Rome were thun- 
dering against the beleaguered walls of the desert 
city, cried to Queen Zenobia : 

" 'Woman, gird up now thy heroic heart and lead 
thine armies against Aurelian.' Zoroaster said : 'The 
thought of a man is swift and cunning to fashion 
deeds, and the hand doeth his will, but in the heart 
heth the strength that holdeth the warrior in the 
place of battle.' A thousand such declarations could 
be gathered from history, literature, legend and tra- 
dition. Despite the learned disquisitions of the dis- 
ciples of Galen, and in the face of our own technical 
knowledge, we are yet slow to break fealty to the 
ancient faith, and now, as of old, we greet the strug- 
gling hero with 'Courage, brave heart !' and the ex- 
pression does not seem inapt. 

"In the sense in which the seers, philosophers, ora- 
17 



tors and poets have applied the theory that the heart 
of man furnishes the lion-like courage that has made 
him the world-conquering creature, I apply it to 
Lincoln when I concede to him the greatest heart that 
ever beat in this dark world of ours. Bayard Taylor, 
in his famous 'Song of the Camp,' says : 'The brav- 
est are the tenderest, the loving are the daring.' And 
who had a tenderer heart than he? The indomitable 
spirit that answered the critics of the grim Grant 
with only the two words, 'He fights,' was yet as ten- 
der, as sensitive as the gentlest woman's soul, 

"He who urged forward 2,000,000 of men into 
war's delirium nightly visited the hospitals at Wash- 
ington and laid his great hand upon the fever-flushed 
faces and sat long by the pitiful beds of the young 
boys who, at his call, had rushed into the crater at 
Petersburg or stormed the bloody angle at Spottsyl- 
vania. The world has called him a martyr because 
of the tragic death that came by the assassin's hand, 
but the four years of crucification through which the 
brave heart passed is his true patent of martyrdom. 
The soldier had his perils to face, his long and weary 
marches to make, his cheerless nights of frost and 
rain, his scant fare and his heart-sickening isolation 
from home and wife and child, but these burdens were 
light compared with the intolerable load under which 
this giant stooped, but did not stagger, for four 
terrible years. Jesus of Nazareth spent one night in 
a dark garden and he sweat, as it were, great drops 
of blood falling to the ground; and he begged pit- 
eously that the bitter cup might not be pressed to his 

38 



lips ! Lincoln passed a thousand nights in Geth- 
semane! For Christ all was still and serene. No 
jarring noises filled the holy night. He saw no sight 
more threatening than the faint Hght of the sentinel 
stars ; no sound more terrible than the weak winds 
whispering in the olive trees. 

"But when Lincoln went apart to pray the stars 
were shrouded. The only lights that pierced the 
gloom were from feeble torches borne by stooping 
searchers, who looked into the cold faces of dead and 
mangled men. He heard moans of dying boys and 
sobs of strong men giving up the ghost. The shrieks 
of mothers were stabbing like daggers at his heart. 
His feet splashed in pools of blood and tears. While 
the pitiful cries of children and the prayers of fathers 
harrowed his soul and drove his brain to the frontiers 
of madness, he saw afar the horizon reddened by the 
flames of burning homes and heard the cannon thun- 
der in the South. Then he arose and, with tears of 
pity yet heavy in his mournful eyes, he called many 
thousands more of the young boys from peaceful 
homes and fed them to the glutted jaws of battle. 

Hours of Unbearable Agony. 

"Once the locked heart broke its bonds and he cried : 
" *I can fight through the days, but, oh, the hor- 
ror of the nights !' 



19 



"A poet has said of these hours of his unbearable 

agony : 

" 'He was the Southern mother leaning forth 
At dead of night to hear the cannon's roar, 
Beseeching God to break the cruel North 
And turn it, that her son might come once more; 
He was New England's maiden, pale and pure, 
Whose gallant lover fell on Shiloh's plain; 
He was the mangled body of the dead; 
He writhing did endure 

Wounds and transfigurement and racking pain. 
Gangrene and amputation — all things dread.' 

"His great soul knew no North, no South. For 
him there was no East nor any West. The mother- 
land was one and inseverable. He loved no section 
more than another. While the brutal cannon shook 
the very walls of the republic he locked his loving 
arms about the crumbling stones and would not let 
them fall. 

"And even while he wrestled with the demons of 
wrath and ruin, while his tortured soul was sick and 
reeling in the path of slaughter, slander and malice 
were busy with the poisoned dagger ; the viper hissed 
against his name, and the foul jackals of a coward 
press howled on his trail. But through all he kept 
a sad face to the South, calling his children from the 
whole land and urging them to the sacrifice of blood 
and fire, and sending with each a red badge of cour- 
age drained from the exhaustless fountain of his own 
heart. 

Sublime Tragedy of History. 

"He gathered all his energies for the last awful 
year of combat. With tears of infinite pity in his 

20 



eyes, but with bolts of battle in his mighty hand, he 
urged on the legions of Grant and Sherman. The 
gallant South once more staggered to her feet. 
Mangled and worn, hopeless, desperate and weak 
from hunger, she threw her thin lines across his path, 
and the most subHme tragedy in the annals of his- 
tory was enacted in the world's sight. The hospitals 
gave up their sick and wounded to fill the rifted gray 
ranks. The Southern mother cheered on her soldier 
son as he staggered into the dehrium of his last bat- 
tle. At every ford a Roland fell; at every bridge 
Horatius died ; in every narrow mountain pass, with 
pallid face upturned to the cold white flash of stars, 
lay the mangled body of Leonidas. 

"Yet through it all how he was misunderstood! 
Not only by the Southerner, who looked into the 
muzzles of his shotted guns, but by millions of those 
who mocked his devotion and sneered at his immortal 
hope. 

"I well remember how one slight soldier boy, a 
mere lad, wearing the faded and dust-filled gray, af- 
ter a dreadful march arose from the ground in the 
wan hght of the morning, and saw, far away to the 
east, the topmost spires of Washington, and as he 
watched the dawn whiten down that noble dome his 
hot foolish heart raged within him as he thought 
*yonder under the shadow of that dome sleeps in peace 
the heartless ruler who gathers and drives on the ever- 
increasing host of invaders. He, it is, who feeds the 
withering fire of Grant, and lights the desolating 
torch of Sherman. He, it is, who turned to ashes the 

21 



roof that sheltered my mother's helpless head, and 
splashed me with my comrade's blood at Spottsyl- 
vania,' and in my heart I hated him. 

"How little I knew him, I could not know that even 
while my foolish heart cursed him, he stood with bared 
head before God, with arms outstretched toward the 
South, with streaming eyes and pale lips creeping in 
distress to cover up their cries, whispering 'children, 
come home.' 

"But the slow, wise years have taught us better. 
We see him now as God then saw him. Then we only 
caught distorted glimpses of his face through rifts 
in the clouds of battle; now we see that face illumi- 
nated with the splendor of the sunburst of peace and 
freedom. 

"It was one who played about the same father's 

knee with me ; a brave young soldier, through whose 

gray jacket and gallant breast a Northern bullet 

crashed, who afterwards visited Lincoln's grave and 

there wrote these lines : 

" 'I, mindful of a dark and bitter past, 

And of its clashing hopes and raging hates, 

Still, standing here, invoke a love so vast 
It cancels all and all obliterates, 

Save love itself, which cannot harbor wrong. 
Oh, for a voice of boundless melody, 
A voice to fill heaven's hollow to the brim 

With one brave burst of song. 

Stronger than tempests, nobler than the sea, 
That I might give it to a song for him.' 

"When has the conquered yielded to the victor such 
tribute as this.? When shall his glory fade? Not 



while hearts are true or men remember. His palace 
is set in the hearts of the people he so loved and they 
will see that his crown shall not crumble nor ever his 
throne go down. 

"It is well for us today to recall the glory of the 
great republic, and to solemnly vow allegiance to the 
great principles upon which its deep foundations were 
laid. With patient villainy men are nightly plotting 
its ruin. They are digging beneath its walls now. 
Ignorant labor is helping them, not knowing to what 
ruin they burrow. Let us keep vigil with the heart of 
Lincoln ; renew the faith of fighting fathers ; shake 
out the flag and see its gold stars marshal. 

"Who can look down the vista of coming years 
and say what is in store for this brave and restless 
people.'' Nations seem to pass through the same 
mutations as living men. They have their childhood 
of weakness and simplicity of life ; their elasticity 
and pliant strength of young manhood ; their broad 
and massive power of middle life, and at last their 
time of senility and death. No old nation has ever 
renewed its youth. Ours, by grace of Lincoln's mighty 
heart, came nearest to such life-renewal. Young as 
we were in I860, we were falling from our high estate. 
The great kings from over sea were wagging their 
wise heads in joy of our downward march to the tomb 
of all republics. 

"But Lincoln's heart was sacrificed in the sight of 
God; heroic milhons saw and joined the colossal sac- 
rifice, and the nation recovered such vitality as never 
thrilled the heart of kingdom or empire. To what 

23 



destiny we move we do not know. Time degrades 
mountains and fills seas ; it takes and breaks the little 
and the great ; the pygmies and the Pallantides ; the 
dwarfs and the colossii ; but it cannot lay its destroy- 
ing hand upon truth, and courage dares its path as 
it dares all things. Republics may fal], kingdoms be 
overset and empires pass like dreams, but courage like 
Lincoln's lives on. 

"It is too early for an eulogy of Lincoln to be 
spoken. It may never be spoken. It may be that 
as the centuries pass the great of earth, those of 
serene souls and boundless love, may stand by his 
grave to gather strength and not to eulogize; and 
these may deem that tender elegiacs are better suited 
to his memory than stately eloquence, and that tears 
are better than thunders of applause ; and these may 
stand with lifted hands and streaming eyes, low- 
speaking in their place, and say, 'Oh, earth, be glad! 
Hold hard to thy thrilled bosom the greatest heart 
that ever beat since thy first mom. Oh, prairie 
winds, breathe low and close and tenderly above him ! 
Oh, sun, be faithful sentinel by day, and thou, oh, 
moon, by night trail thy pale veil of silver through 
the hills that he may not lie in darkness and alone! 
Oh, holy stars, smile on forever, filled with the perfect 
peace of him who sleeps and dreams no dreams. Oh, 
land redeemed and disenthralled, come to this Mecca, 
pilgrim-wise, and learn how great a thing is im- 
measurable love linked with immortal courage.' " 



24 



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